call girls.
He looked at the rest of the pictures. The women, already naked, progressed quickly beyond the kissing stage. In one shot the brunette had her face buried between the blonde’s smooth thighs. The blonde was looking down on the younger woman, her face haughty as she pulled at the woman’s hair.
“What’s this all about, Sanders?” Bolan wondered.
Bolan pulled two photos out of the pile and set them in front of him. He slid the rest back into their envelope. The two photos he kept out each showed close shots of the women’s faces. Bolan studied them intently, memorizing every detail. When he was satisfied he’d recognize them in person, he put them away and opened the final envelope from the drop.
Inside the envelope was folded piece of stationery. Bolan unfolded it and looked at what was written there. It was a simple series of numbers.
Bolan frowned. If the drop was a fast turnover situation, then it was possible the code was a simple system meant for Sanders to decipher quickly and then destroy, rather than sophisticated encryption.
The soldier got up and stretched. He went back out into the living area where he had seen a desk with a computer on it. It might help with research, but the house had been set up as a hideaway, not a field operations center, and communications were not infallibly secure. There were the cyberequivalents of blind drops, but Bolan had no intention of using them from this location unless absolutely necessary.
Bolan needed a good, down and dirty, field code Sanders might have instructed a stringer in. From the numbers, it seemed to be a replacement code of some sort. Bolan got to work with pen and paper. He was in Operational Theater Six. He added that to the last digit of the day of the date of the drop, then transposed the numbers with letters of the alphabet.
He tried the day Sanders had made his call, got a jumble of alphabet letters, then tried switching the letters out with the next letter in the alphabet. Nothing. He tried it with the letter prior and came up empty. He snarled in frustration and thrust the sheets of paper away.
Bolan got up and went to the refrigerator. He reached in and pulled out a green bottle of Heineken. He idly wondered what poor schmuck had gone all the way through college CIA recruitment only to find himself putting his security clearance to use stocking the fridge in some rarely used safehouse.
Bolan sat the beer down unopened. His mind was cluttered with images, snapshot memories of a hundred different events and a thousand different days from his past. He walked over to the doorway and reached up to grab the lip of the frame at the top. He dug his fingers in tightly and began to pull himself up in slow, deliberate movements. The exercise was an old rock climbing movement designed to strengthen the hands and forearms as much as the biceps and back.
After an easy fifteen chin-ups to get his blood moving, Bolan lowered himself and walked back to the table. He clenched and unclenched his fists, loosening the muscles of his grip. He shrugged back to stretch his shoulders and looked down at the table.
Bolan shook random thoughts away and sat, pulling his notes toward him. He looked at the numbers. They sat there, stubbornly refusing to give up their secrets. Then a slow smile slid across his face.
The soldier stood and crossed to the computer where he immediately logged on. He set his notes beside him at the desk and signed on to the Internet. He pulled up a Russian-English dictionary Website. He typed a word from his notes into the computer. The word came back unknown. Bolan threw that sheet down and picked up the sheet where he had transposed the letter corresponding with the number abstraction with the letter directly following it.
He hurriedly typed the series of letters into the computer. He got a match. He wrote the match down, then typed in each word until he translated the note in its entirety. When he was done he leaned back, feeling satisfied despite himself.
He read the note.
Tan is a dupe. Break all contact.
7
Bolan got out of the taxi on a secondary street in Grozny’s renovated financial district. The gigantic, gutted structure of the old Oil Ministry building cast long shadows over the Meltzer Import Export Emporium. The covert station house was a tasteful, discreet building with darkened, lead-lined windows and subdued walls.
The soldier surveyed the building. He’d tried to avoid making contact with Grozny station only because Sanders himself had avoided using the place in making contact with higher authority. Bolan would have preferred to slip in and out of this operations region without officially entering the fiefdom of the local station.
But Sanders’ failure to show for the meet and subsequent events had made such an approach unworkable. Bolan had no intention of leaving the drop envelopes with them. He’d put them in a safe at the secure house before taking a shower and going to bed.
Bolan entered the austere offices and approached a pretty receptionist behind a massive desk. A plaque on her desk read Ms. Pong, and her face seemed locked in a mask of perpetual boredom. She regarded Bolan with a disinterested stare. He smiled his good morning.
“You speak English?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“I have a question about goods.”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if you could tell me whether or not the futures in Chechen oil could be considered robust?”
The receptionist didn’t blink at the covert parole code. She stared up at Bolan with expressionless, black eyes. Her voice was monotone when she answered.
“I wouldn’t know. We only handle manufactured goods,” she said. “Please wait in there.”
The receptionist indicated a door set discreetly in the wall toward the back of the lobby, away from the elevator banks and half-hidden by a potted rubber tree plant. She reached a well-manicured hand under her desktop, and a muted buzzer sounded.
Bolan crossed the room quickly and went through the door. He heard an electronically controlled dead bolt slide into place as the door swung closed behind him. He looked around.
He was in a short, well-lit hallway. A line of comfortable chairs sat against a wall decorated in muted tones. Bolan sat, looking for the security cameras. Unable to spot them, he decided they were using telescopic fiber optics.
A door in the hallway opened and a man walked out. Bolan sized him up and didn’t like the vibe he picked up. He was Caucasian and big. Big in the way Eastern Europeans and Russians seemed to get as they slipped into middle age. The man stood almost a full head taller than Bolan and had to have weighted in at close to three hundred pounds. He looked like a bear right before hibernation—powerful muscles covered by copious amounts of fat.
The man wore a mustache and beard, shot through with gray, and his hairline receded prodigiously. His suit was expensive-looking, as was his gold watch. He strode up and stopped before Bolan, who had risen at the man’s approach.
“You are from the DNI,” the man said.
It wasn’t a question and he didn’t offer to shake hands.
“I already know that. Who are you?” Bolan said calmly.
The man stepped forward into Bolan’s space in a maneuver clearly designed to intimidate the newcomer. It was the kind of bluster that occurred every day in boardrooms, but it was a disrespectful move that could get a person killed in a prison yard or the wrong kind of bar.
Bolan stepped into the looming approach and both men stopped within a hairbreadth of butting chests. The man’s gut was considerable, but up close he looked strong enough to wrestle tigers. Bolan didn’t back down. The pair locked fierce gazes, neither man blinking.
“I see you’ve met case officer Kubrick,” a cultured voice from behind them said.
Bolan’s eyes flickered away, and he took in the second man who had just emerged from one of the office doorways.